Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Ruth might have killed him with the smallest-caliber monosyllable. But she didn’t. Jonah stood in front of her. “Twenty years. Why?” She bit her lip and shook her head — not at his question, but at him. He nodded. “Won’t be so long, next time.” She let him embrace her, and she held on, even as he pulled away. He didn’t embrace me; for us, it had been only three. Instead, he shoved into my hands an article he’d clipped from the previous day’s New York Times. April 24: “Scientists Report Profound Insight on How Time Began.”

“You have to read this, Joey. Message from Da, from beyond the grave.”

Jonah drove off. Ruth waved a little, after he was too far to see. She felt no need even to mention his scheme to me. We were our brother’s future. But he wasn’t ours.

He didn’t call us before he went to L.A. The press of performing tied him up. The Berkeley Festival was a resplendent conquest, by all paid accounts. He and Voces Antiquae flew down to Los Angeles on the second-to-the-last day of April. Their plane was one of the last to land at LAX before the outbreak shut down all incoming flights.

Ruth called first, that Wednesday night. She spoke so softly into the phone, I thought there was something wrong with the line. She kept saying, “Joey, Joey.” I was sure one of the boys was dead. “They let them all go. All four of them. Not guilty on every count. Beaten fifty-six times, on videotape, for the whole world to see, and it’s like nothing happened. It’s not possible. Not even here.”

Jonah’s article from the Times had been the first piece of news I’d read for months. I’d given up on current events. News was nothing to me, a cruel tease. It was nothing but the delusion that things were still happening. I’d dismissed it. All my news came down to New Day School. I’d forgotten the King verdict was even due. As Ruth told me of the blanket acquittal, I’d already heard the outcome, word for word, a long time before.

Now news took me in again. I flipped on my set while Ruth was still on the line. Aerial-reconnaissance video showed what I thought at first was King. But this was another man, the other color, pulled from his truck and stoned live for the cameras. “Are you seeing this?” I asked her. Something in me wanted her to hurt. To kill her self-possession as dead as mine. “You see where belonging gets us?”

“It’s never ending,” my sister kept saying into the receiver. And it was.

The staff of New Day kept a broadcast going in the teachers’ room all Thursday. Nobody was really teaching. We all kept slipping in to watch. Not even horrified. Just dulled, in that place that would forever return to claim us all. Plumes of fire streaked the skyline of the dying city, burning out of control. The police retreated, leaving the streets to looters of every persuasion. The National Guard assembled on their beachheads but couldn’t move out for want of ammunition. Shops went up in flames like shavings in a kiln. The body count climbed. One of the third-grade teachers turned on a set in a classroom, thinking it might be instructive. She turned it off again five minutes later, instruction outgrowing itself. The rout was total, and as darkness fell again the second day, hell spread so fast, it felt positively willed.

Ruth wouldn’t go home alone. She demanded I have dinner with her. While we ate, all hope burned. “What are they doing?” my nephew asked. “What’s happening there? Are they having a war?” My sister stared at the news feed throughout dinner, biting her lip. I’d never before seen her refuse to answer Robert’s questions.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked. “Why the hell doesn’t he call us?” I didn’t say he was lying on the pavement in South Central, sight-singing the sky. I let Ruth’s question, too, go unanswered.

He called, with answers, at 2:40A.M. Friday. I must have been dreaming, because I was talking to him before I heard the phone ring. He sounded thrilled, on the verge of some huge insight. “Joey? Mule? I’m here. Again.” I had to wake up enough to hear he was in shock. “You see what this means? Right back dead in the middle of it. I heard the whole thing, at least until they got my ear. Every line. Tell her that. You have to tell her.”

I pulled my head from out of sleep and tried to talk him down. “Jonah. Thank God you’re safe. It’s okay, now. They said on the news tonight. Things are returning to normal.”

“Normal? This is normal, Joey.” Shrieking: “This.”

“Jonah. Listen to me. It’s okay. Are you at the hotel? Just stay inside. The army—”

“Inside? Inside? You never had a clue, did you? Fool!” I heard the nakedness. He’d thought me a fool all our shared life. And he was right. But he blasted forward, unable to wait for either of us. He was struggling to breathe. “I’ve been out in the middle of this since yesterday afternoon. I went in, Mule. Looking for what I was supposed to do. Did everything I know. I stood on a burning corner and tried to form a pickup chorus of ‘Got the whole world in his hands.’ You have to tell her that. She’s wrong. Wrong about me. Don’t let her think what she thinks.” His voice was huge with the performance of a lifetime. He was drawing on that ancient lesson his lover-teacher once gave him: If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out on stage.

“I’ll tell her, Jonah.” I had to repeat it before he calmed down enough to make sense.

He tittered as he spoke. “They canceled the concert. I guess the early music crowd was afraid to come out for a Last Judgment. The Europeans were freaking. Trapped in the country of their worst nightmares. They barricaded themselves in the hotel. I had to go back, Joey. It was you and me, the night of our first recording.” The curve of his life was calling for him to come trace it, somewhere out there in the burning streets.

He headed into the violence, toward the pitch of maximum distress, with nothing but his overtrained ears to lead him on. “What did you look like?” I asked.

“Look? Like me!” It took him a moment; he was still reeling. “Chino pants and a teal Vroom and Dreesmann dress shirt. I know: total suicide pact. Oh. A solid black T-shirt underneath that saysFEAR NO ART. The limo wouldn’t take me past the I-Ten. I must have gone the last two miles on foot. Can’t remember everything. Out of my gourd, Joey. That crowd. You remember. I no longer meant myself. I was walking back into the sea. Taking my first voice lesson. Dum, dum, dum. There was nothing. Nothing but fires. Götterdämmerung on a two-billion-dollar budget. Mule. I thought opera was someone else’s nightmare. I never knew that someone else was me.

“I just followed the smoke. Kept looking around for you. I wound up in some flaming retail strip. Every sheet of glass for blocks around was lying on the pavement, sparkling like rosin. Palm-sized hunks of concrete, whipping through the intersection. Couldn’t count the sides. Latinos, Koreans, blacks, white guys in uniform. I might have been singing. Standing in the middle of the cross fire. This piece of paving stone size of my shoe heel hits me in the side of the head. Ripped into my temple. I just stood there snapping my fingers, first on one side of my head, then the other. Deaf in my left ear. Me, Joey. Can’t hear a damn thing! Listen!” He fumbled to switch the phone to his other ear. “Hear that? Nothing!

“That’s when I find myself. I start running. Blood is streaming out of my ruined ear. They can’t hit me twice. I figure I’m safe, right? They can’t come after me. Who knows what color I am? I’m nobody. Safer than I’ve been since… Something’s pulling me, like Brahms. Like this is going on again, for eternity. I’m back here for a reason. Across the street, at the end of the next block, these kids are pouring out of a hardware store, arms full. You remember? Power drills. A workbench. An electric saw. They see me just standing there. Score something, you choosy motherfucker. One of them stops, and I think he’s going to dust me. Shoot me. He stops and hands me this can of paint and a handful of brushes. Like he’s God, and this is just for me. I’m trying to pay him. To pay the sacked store. He’s just screaming and laughing at me.